Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

Mauro Notarianni writes in that the Danish Technical University (DTU) has developed the Scandinavia's largest dedicated Mac cluster. "Velocity-X" is packed with 32 dual G4/800's (200 Gigaflops), and will be turned on Monday. Its primary use will be studying the influence of proteins on cancer, and, more importantly, large film and animation projects. It can be rented for DKK 50,000 (about USD 6,500) per week.

Well, considering that this project was almost certainly begun BEFORE the Xserve announcement and that the Xserve isn't shipping as of yet - it would still be vaporware instead of a reality. Just my opinion!

i do agree it seems like a much cleaner happier way to do it (if you have the money). unfortunately there are some issues.......

1) xserve isn't shipping yet. apple site says 2-3 weeks still, though there are rumors they will be shipping any day now.

2) the dual processor xserve is $4,000 (the single processor is the $3000 model). i would wonder if the included software would be seen as a waste when buying a plethora of these. then again if you are curing cancer i guess worrying about the extra $$$$ for the right equipment seems like crying over spilled milk.

as posted above, dual 800mghz G4 machines are older stock so i am guessing they were either purchased a while ago, or they got a good price break. i think we'll see them down the road, supposedly the xserve will be easy to cluster. actually according to stories posted here and on MacSlash in the past it seems that people can unbox, setup and startup a G4 cluster in a day.

this article [apple.com], which may shed some light on what they plan to do with this and why OSX is a requirement. Does anybody know anything more about protein crystallography and why it would require "stereo" video cards?

If you shine light through a crystal, it is diffracted in a specific manner that can be corollated with the internal structure of that crystal. Shining X-Rays through crystallized protein will similarly produce a diffraction pattern that can be used to determine the three dimensional structure of that protein.

A stereo video card is a system that can present different video images to the left and right eye of the user, producing an illusion of depth. I would imagine that this would be very helpful in visualizing three dimensional protein structure.

Consistantly, Apple has been making strides to create a platform that is ideal for scientific applications like this. The Altivec processing unit allows the G4 to handle 256bit chunks of data at a time and process it fast. The large cache will allow the process to never starve for info from ram. Optimized number crunching aps for Mac smoke (most) anything else out there, and certainly anything on the x86 side of computing.

Further more, anyone out there who complains about wintel and isn't up to their neck in open source development should back off on the Apple bashing. Here is a company who is, at the very least, trying to innovate or just evolve computing to be better for everyone. (while making money, as any business is designed to) Unintelligent Apple bashing is getting pretty old by now. Why don't you come up with some factual arguements..or better yet, go to an Apple store and use one for a while. Start the terminal..find out just how half-baked windows is compared to OS X and how easy the Mac OS is compared to the hair pulling fun of linux. (yes I know red had can be installed by a monkey, but if you break it, good luck for any newbie)

Maybe they will just be saving money on power consumption?:) I can be a sucker for the apple propaganda in hopes that it can sweep intel/ms based stuff away.

Why, do you suppose Genentech decided to go the PowerPC route if x86 can be so much faster?

I've also heard that the x86 based processors don't work as well with multiple CPUs or in clusters as do the PowerPCs.

Power4 machines are PowerPC/risc (although I could be wrong)..that has to count for something. I don't think motolorla is putting down the money or time for clusters the way that IBM is.

Additionaly, my comments weren't directed at objective/factual commintary, but at those who pass off apple as a passing fad or some joke of a computer. I personally use both a WinXP box and a Mac OS X laptop. (but the wintel box was free)

counting about 4 fp per clock cycle! Only a trivial loop in assembler can achieve this kind of performance. I bet that on the LINPACK benchmark, considering a fast ethernet network, this thing can achieve maybe 50 GFlops max depending on the amount of memory available. A cluster of XP 1800s delivering the same performance costs about $30,000 nowadays including a switch. Besides, I see only the point of paying for computer power in the case of, say, a 1 hour run on a 1000 processor machine with 500 Gb of RAM, which one could never achieve on "normal" workstations. The danish MacWulf doesn't seem so interesting.